Fall 2021 One Room Challenge - Week 8: Side Yard Reveal!

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It’s mid November here in Canada and while it has been pretty rainy and overcast we had one gorgeous snowy day this week to take a few pictures of our recently finished One Room Challenge side yard! This was the last outdoor space to complete with the installation of an iron fence, chicken coop and run, new perennial gardens and planting more trees and shrubs. With over 500 bulbs tucked away and 5 bags of grass seed down, the most dramatic reveal will happen in the spring when everything is in full bloom. I can’t wait!

If you’re new to our work and our blog, hello and welcome! My name is Carley Brandon, Strategy Manager for Canada’s best telecommunications company TELUS by day, Redesigner by night, “Love” to Grant and “Mommy” to Matthew and Lily and our fur babies Poppy, our seal point himalayan, and Mr. Finnigan Flowers, our wheaten terrier, around the clock. We live in Orillia, Ontario, Canada and have been updating our cozy 1970s side split over the past two years.

We learned in late summer that we had been accepted to participate in our little city’s Backyard Hen Pilot Project after being on the waiting list for well over a year. We submitted our chicken coop and run plans for approval, included the build in our One Room Challenge and welcomed 4 lovely ladies (hens) to our home - “Viola” (Lavender Orpington), “Peach” (Salmon Faverolle), “Lacey” aka “Cluck Norris” (Silver Laced Wyandotte) and “Linda” (Cream Legbar).

This is my ninth One Room Challenge space after participating in the Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018 , Fall 2018 , Spring 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 challenges including 5 bedrooms, a stairway library, cottage bunkie, laundry room and backyard! Grant and I had purchased all of the materials to renovate the bathrooms inside the house and were thinking about completing one of them for this challenge but the pandemic shifted our priorities. We decided to focus our attention outdoors to completely finish our yard and will work on the bathrooms this winter.

“BEFORE”

In order to fully appreciate this redesigned space, please take a look at Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Weeks 4-7, of our challenge progress. Here are a few pictures of what the space looked like before - pretty bare and ready for a makeover, especially after the removal of a few ash trees

DESIGN DIRECTION

Last year we completed our backyard living/dining area with brown and cream patio furniture, weathered teak and a creamy white shed. While the side yard is visible from the street it is also visible from our backyard so we needed the spaces to work together. As a result, we’re used the same creamy white paint colour we used on the shed to paint the chicken coop, bringing in brown through the steel roof and some copper elements.

When thinking about plant materials for our side gardens that would compliment our gardens at the front and back, we chose forsythia, hydrangeas and globe cedars as well as two flowering crabapple trees, creating a hedgerow in front of a decorative iron fence.

REDESIGNED FINDS

For those of you who have followed me on Instagram or through our blog, you already know that Reducing, Reusing and Recycling - “Redesign” - is at the heart of everything I do. I always try to use what we or clients already have and love and incorporate vintage and antique elements to achieve a look that is curated over time. Almost every item in our side yard had a previous life which was a great exercise in sustainability.

We created the chicken coop by reusing an insulated fishing hut that my brother Paul built years ago but no longer needed, reused an old dog run for our chicken run, used old bricks as bases for feeders and waterers in the run and sourced a 40 foot ornamental iron fence including 2 gates from Kijiji. Most of the materials - barn board, steel for the roof, feeders and waterers - all came from our family farm thanks to my Dad Doug. As a special touch, we used antique corbels from Grant’s family’s store Antiques on 11 to build the chicken roost and created nesting boxes from wooden wine crates Grant’s Dad Ralph had in storage.

Our side yard is now winter ready after planting over 500 bulbs, wrapping the flowering crab trees to keep nibbling bunnies at bay and piling heaps of maple leaves on top of all of the gardens as an extra layer of protection. We hung wreaths and created custom planters with lots of greenery to welcome the new season and are hoping to hang a few Christmas lights this weekend. We can’t wait to see this beautiful space change over the coming months and watch all of the wild birds, our chickens, Poppy and Finnigan take advantage of their new playground. We will also welcome a doberman puppy named “Beatrix” to the family in a few weeks. Beatrix is Grant’s 40th birthday present and the main (and secret) reason that I prioritized the side yard and fence.

THANK YOU!

Thank you Lynda for organizing this event again!

Thank you to our amazing small businesses for your collaboration, products and services that allowed us to create such a special space safely while we support each other through this pandemic:

Thank you to our family:

  • my Dad Doug for his masterful hoarding skills and transporting building materials, enabling us to build the coop and run on a very tight budget with reused materials

  • Grant’s Dad Ralph for loaning us a dump trailer and for providing all the nesting box materials

  • my brother-in-law Dave of Ground Control for countless hours of design, instruction and building

  • my brother Paul for the fishing hut that we reused for our coop, tool rentals and lots of advice along the way

  • and last but certainly not least, Grant. I may have had to bribe him along the way with new Dewalt tools and he may have called me “crazy” more than a few times throughout this project but in the end he brought all my ideas to life. And for someone who didn’t want anything to do with the chickens initially (yet 100% supported me with this project), he sure races to the coop when he gets home to collect eggs and he built the chickens a swing. Yes you read that correctly … he built them a swing …

Carley